Award-winning author Gish Jen's new book,The Girl at the Baggage Claim, explores differences in the way Easterners and Westerners view self and society. Below, she recommends books that illuminate that cultural divide:

Do children of different cultures tell their stories differently? This book produced in me the proverbial shiver up the spine for which readers all read. I have returned to it repeatedly since its publication in 1995.

This is the book I ached to read as soon as I closed Chameleon Readers — but I had to wait 17 years. It was well worth the wait: Wang shines a light into the very heart of East-West narrative difference, rooting it in autobiography. My copy may be more marked up than any other book I've ever owned.

Can there really be measurable differences in the way Easterners and Westerners perceive the world? With study after study, Nisbett manages not only to convince us that this is the case; he conveys the astonishment and excitement with which the findings were received. A classic.

So what does this difference in self, as described by Nisbett, have to do with race, class, and gender — not to mention regional and religious differences? Everything. Markus and her colleagues interpret their exhaustive research in what may be the ultimate navigational guide to our complicated time.

Intuitively, we may realize that culture affects not only every choice we make but also how we conceptualize our choices. Still, it takes the observational powers of a blind immigrant psychologist to make us see how profoundly true this is.

Is it any surprise that differences in self and culture give rise to radically different ideas about how to live? This lovely book ably distills an entire Harvard philosophy course. It imparts both knowledge and wisdom.